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Broncos Vs. Patriots – Tebow got Tebowed!

In a totally spur of the moment occasion, it was decided that me, my brother and dad would travel to New England to watch the Broncos face off against the Patriots. We all made a pact to eachother, that we would look for any opportunity to do something cool together and create memories with each other. Memories were definitely made on that cold night.  The aura of Tebow was in the air, but it wasn’t enough to stop Tom Brady and the Patriots from crushing them. We had so much fun that we decided to book another flight to San Francisco to see the game next week versus the Giants. Crazy I know, but crazy is what I do best.

Here is a little video I shot. Sorry for the crappy camera work, it was freaking cold out there. Thanks to Axel Rose, Slash and the rest of GnR for the music.

Random shots of us Tebowing around:

Tebowing in the Airport
Tebowing in the Airport
Tebowing at Gillette Stadium
The guys celebrating. In order (Me, My brother, and my Dad) Special thanks to both my dad and brother for making this trip unforgettable.

Some Key Social Media Trends To Look For In 2012

In 2011, social media had its share of growing pains. Large brands and corporations took to social media in force to try to find footing in this expanding medium. Some brands found success, while others found peril and new PR nightmares. One person who has helped brands navigate the proverbial social media minefield is Amy Jo Martin. She is the founder of Digital Royalty, a social media firm that has set itself apart by helping A-listers find their social media voice.

Amy works with people like Dana White of the UFC, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson of acting/WWE fame and brands like Nike and Fox Sports (and now Joel Stein). Her specialty is working with organizations or individuals and making them look good online. Since the online world is in perpetual flux, I wanted to get Amy’s take on the social media landscape for 2012.

Here were a few key trends Amy said we should look out for in 2012:

1. Social TV Integration

Many shows have already begun to integrate social TV, either through polling or integrating social elements within the show. See my example of how both the UFC and WWE are integrating social media into their programming. Social media played a pivotal role in the last presidential election, and it will likely be more integrated into political broadcasts.

As each news channel fights hard to keep their viewers engaged, networks like CNN and Fox have made significant strides to engage their audience, although some would argue that this social media integration has come at the expense of hard-hitting journalism and analysis.

2. TV Is Going Online in a Big Way

2012 will be the first time that the Super Bowl will be streamed live to the world. Since the Super Bowl is generally viewed as the mother of all advertising spectacles, it will add a new dynamic into the digital component to advertising and social media integration.

3. Facebook Credits Take Center stage

Facebook in 2012 has the potential to project its power and truly take Facebook credits into a viable currency. Amy puts it quite well when she says “they’re building an online destination we’ll never need to leave, and my guess is they’re only about 8% of the way through their product roadmap.”

4. Big Business Has Woken Up

The way corporate entities approach social media is shifting. Many companies realize that setting up Twitter, YouTube and Facebook accounts is not going to cut it as their social media strategy. Brands will need to seriously shift their perspective by treating social channels more like communication channels and less like an advertising channels in order to make a difference. From my perspective this transition has already occurred, judging by the extent to which brands’ Twitter accounts are now used as channels for CRM and customer support, managing pissed off or happy customers in near realtime.

5. ROI Is Still Huge

ROI will remain a key metric to any social media strategy. The concept of engagement is now becoming more and more an excepted metric. CEO adoption of social media is improving, and more CEOs are recognizing the benefits of humanizing their brand by taking to Twitter.

Customer service, research and image branding could all be considered social media intangibles, yet all three are obviously important in business. Social channels impact every single aspect of business from human relations to finance, sales, operations and legal. It’s important for everyone to understand how social media affects their role and responsibilities. Opposite of television, social media is a dialogue vs. a monologue and if a brand is able to collect opinions real-time in high volume via social channels like Facebook polls, they can save a great deal of money on formal research studies.

There have been a lot of discussions about social media fatigue and whether brands refuse to play for that reason. With over a billion people on social media it’s irresponsible for any brand not to have some sort of presence. 2012 will be the year for brands to go beyond cookie cutter campaigns and really determine how it not only adds value to their company, but how it adds value for their customers. 2012 will be crucial for companies and social media. For those who don’t see a direct correlation between social media and sales consider:

“Social media is an ideal tool for moving people up the fan ladder, from being a casual fan of a brand to a loyalist, because the communication channels allow people to build stronger emotional connections with brands.”

So in 2012, the question is, how will your brand use effective strategy to move people up the fan ladder from interested to foaming at the mouth brand zealots?

Originally posted on TechCrunch here.

Laura Turns 30 an Infographic

I wanted to celebrate my wife Laura Puopolo‘s birthday in a unique way. I got this idea from Renee Warren and her Fiancée  Dan Martell. I worked with my cousin Alysha who is an amazing illustrator to create something a little bit different to honour Laura’s big 30th Birthday. Click on the infographic below to learn a bit more about Laura’s amazing life so far …


Anna turns 1

A year has passed, and our little girl has just turned one. Last year at this time, we were patiently waiting for our little girl to arrive and didn’t realize how much our lives were about to change. Much like the rest of the year, Anna’s birthday was celebrated with family and friends. The amount of love, care, support that we have received has been tremendous and so unconditional. This, I think, is due in part to Anna’s infectious personality. She truly comes into a room and charms everyone with her eyes, her smile and her personality.

This year has not been without its share of ups and downs. The highs of watching Anna taking her first steps have also been counterbalanced with the stress of her surgery and everything that followed. The reality is that we have entered into an amazing roller coaster, with the highest highs and the lowest lows. Parenthood is an amazing journey and it has only just begun. Our family will change and continue to grow, and we know that this unforgettable year will be followed by many more .

I think my wife Laura said it best when she said:

One year ago today, I was in the hospital about to give birth. Anna joined us at 12:37 am on January 9. I can’t believe my baby is one! What a year it’s been – joy and frustration, laughter and tears. I wouldn’t change a minute of it!

We love you Anna!

Rules of Customer Service and Being a Good Customer

Rules of Customer Service and being a Good Customer

I decided to take the week after Christmas off this year, as I usually do. This has become an annual tradition to help me recharge my batteries and get ready for the next year. This year, as usual, I got a raft of gift cards for Christmas and this week I went to brave the horror that is after Christmas shopping to look for some bargains.

This year, I have taken a ton of pictures. In fact, nearly 5000 pictures since I got my new camera. Just this Christmas alone, between my camera and video camera I created over 10 gigs of content.  I decided to go into a chain of camera stores, Henry’s. This chain has a huge selection and while I got my camera at Vistek, my gift card was for Henrys. Admittedly I am not the world’s greatest photographer (big shocker there) but I still have a lot of pro gear and am getting better with it all the time. I usually keep my camera on auto focus and let it do the work. I went to go look at lenses, and quickly felt belittled by the clerk who wanted to show off how much more he knew about my camera than I did. I was in the shop and probably would have dropped nearly 1000 bucks on a new lens had the clerk not made me feel like I was a 10 year old.

There I was, a customer with a 200 dollar gift card to spend in this shop and he couldn’t close the sale. It got me thinking about good customer service. On the flipside, customers can be rude and belligerent themselves. They lie, and manipulate in-store policies to get something that they probably shouldn’t receive. During Christmas shopping I had to tell a fellow customer to stop being a dick when he berated a clerk for something that was clearly not her fault.

This is a set of rules I have developed for both customer service and for the customer to follow:

Rules of Customer Service

  1. Don’t belittle the customer – It is your job to know more than the customer. That said, don’t make them feel like they are 5 years old. You need to be relatable, helpful and human to the customer.
  2. Work on behalf of both the customer and company – You need to operate for the best interests of both the customer and your company. You are the liaison between both groups and will earn a lot of loyalty and esteem if you try to find creative solutions to help the customer within the guidelines of the company.
  3. Don’t repeat the same mistakes – If you are seeing repeatable issues that are hindering customer experience for a wide group of customers, it is your job to find a solution with management to address them. If you don’t address those issues you are not doing your job as a front line employee to improve the experience.
  4. Upsell to the benefit of the customer – Sometimes a customer doesn’t know what they need. Sometimes you need to upsell the values of a more expensive solution if it solves a longer term need. There is nothing worse than underselling them and feeling like they haven’t got something that will fulfill their long term needs.
  5. Be there for your customer not your own cellphone – There is nothing that annoys me more than a customer service representative, too busy on their own cell phone not to notice me. Stop texting your boyfriend and/or girlfriend and help the customer.

Rules of Being a Customer

  1. Don’t lie and cheat your way to save 10 dollars– If I had a dollar for every time I watched a customer try to cheat and manipulate their way to marginal savings, I would be a very rich man. I am not talking about negotiation, I am talking about sketchy returns, complaining that you missed a sale etc. I find a lot of problems are as a result of one of two things:
    • A customer not paying attention or,
    • A customer being lazy and not taking advantage of a deal, then complaining about it after they missed it.
  2. Don’t bully – There is a difference between being assertive and bullying and it is a fine line. Many times I have seen people being rude and belligerent for the wrong reasons.
  3. Remember they are people too – Sometimes it is all too easy to see the people on the other side of the counter as people fulfilling a role and not people. The second you don’t see them as people you can easily treat them worse than they likely deserve.
  4. Be responsible with social media – I find a lot of customers are using social media like a hostage negotiation situation. If you don’t give me what I want I will make a stink of social media. I admittedly have used this tactic before. That said I realize upon using it, that I need to be careful not to cry wolf and complain every time something hasn’t gone my way. On the flip side when someone has given me excellent customer service, I will be the first to hop on Twitter and Facebook and call it out. I would guard against being quick to scorn, but slow to appreciate good behaviour.

Summary: The customer service and customer relationship is a complicated one. Both parties need to operate responsibly in order to achieve their needs. These guidelines should help both parties work in a constructive fashion to that end.

Christmas Surprise – Family Reunited for Christmas

I wanted to surprise my family by bringing home my brother in-law (Bryan) and his Girlfriend (Shannon) for home Christmas. They moved away to Nova Scotia 10 months and the family last saw him 6 months ago when visiting. No one had any clue he was coming home for the holidays. This was the video I shot of them coming home to celebrate the holidays and the surprise when everyone found out he was home.

Note: Michael Buble didn’t give me permission to use the song, I hope he understands. He seems like a pretty cool guy 🙂 This video was created purely to share our Christmas joy.

"Twitter is the greatest invention in marketing history" Says UFC's Dana White

I got to sit down and interview Dana White ahead of UFC 140. The event takes place on December 10th in Toronto, Canada and like every UFC event, heavily hyped via social media. Over the past 3 years, Dana White and the UFC have built a very strong social media presence. I wanted to speak to the head of the UFC himself and get some more detail on what he thinks of Twitter and other social media tools. Dana goes on to outline how he got into Twitter, how he uses it to help his business, what are the pitfalls and benefits.

Amy Jo Martin of Digital Royalty, who helps build social media strategies for business such as the UFC had this to say about Dana White and his use of Twitter.

“Dana White was the first sports executive to see the power of these new communication channels. From day one, Dana and the UFC have treated social media channels as a dialogue vs. a monologue.” Digital Royalty

5 Quick Steps to increase traffic to your site via Search Engine Optimization

I wanted to write a simple article on SEO or Search Engine Optimization. I have a lot of people coming to me and asking how they can improve their ranking and drive more traffic. Time and again, the people I am working with haven’t done these basic steps required to drive traffic. I wanted to take a few minutes to break down SEO and to show how it can be made quite simple. This isn’t to say I don’t have a lot more advanced tricks up my sleeve, but this will at least get you on the right path.  More importantly, it will help you to start driving traffic to your site.

  1. Do some basic analysis – Want to get more traffic to your site? Start by understanding what people are searching for. With all the tools currently available, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be able to understand what people are searching for.
    1. Get the Tools – Start by getting a Google Analytics account. Using this account you can use the Google keyword predictor to see what are the relative searches on different keywords on a monthly basis.
    2. Pick 20 Keywords – Once you see the list and the searches, pick keywords to optimize against. If you try to pick all of them you will water down your site too much (unless you know what you are doing). You want to pick keywords that you think you could convert on and have a chance of ranking on in Google.
    3. Analyze – Analyze your current site against those 20 keywords that you just picked and figure out where the deficiencies are. Which keywords could be mapped against existing content? Am I missing content? If so, what? You need to ask yourself all of these questions at this step.
    4. Localize – If you are trying to capture a local market, use local markers like cities and neighborhoods to further refine your keywords. Adding your location to Google Places is also extremely handy for driving traffic, especially when people are searching on Google Maps.
  2. Create Content – Content is king (yes I just broke out that cliché, mostly because it is true). Text, video and images are your weapons. If you have all 3, you are set.  Start by tailoring good text around the keywords. Don’t write for the search engine, but don’t keep the search engine out of mind when you are writing them. If you have images, rename them to your keywords. Take the time to implement Alt and Anchor text throughout the site. Alt text refers to alternative text that tells the search engine what an image is, anchor text refers to additional text attached to a link to give the search engine more context of what a link is. Video is also important.  If you have video, make sure to title it appropriately along with the correct link back to your site when you upload to YouTube. Video can really help boost a search position of the site. In anything you do you need to define your meta information. Meta information is contextual information that Google reads to understand what the site is about. It is typically made up of four things:
    • Title Tag – What is the title of this page
    • Meta Description – Give a brief description of the page
    • Meta Tags – Keywords used within this tag
    • H1 Tag – while not technically meta information, it is important. It is your first heading within the content of the site and is very important.

3. Create some links to your site – Google needs to know that your site is worth visiting. One of the key methods to achieve that is by creating other links back to your site. A link back to your site is a vote in Google’s eyes that your site is worth visiting. Some quick places to create some meaningful links back to your site are Yahoo Answers, Quora or other people’s blogs. A really quick way to get a link is to respond to someone’s question and use your website as part of the answer

4. Create a simple navigational structure on your site –In order for Google to see all of your content once it gets there, you need a simple navigational structure. Make sure that Google can get to multiple pages from anywhere in the site. You want someone to be able to get through 90% of the site in 2-3 links. Ensure all of those links are as descriptive as possible so Google knows what kind of content it is visiting. Most WordPress sites allow for an integrated menu system that will save you time.

5. If you try to game Google you will be caught – There are a lot of ways to try to cheat or trick Google. If you try to play these games you are going to get caught. You might get a temporary boost in traffic, but then you will find that you get pushed to the back of the pack. This is also referred to as Black Hat SEO. Play by the rules and you will be rewarded. Your interest is to build a strong relationship with Google by playing by the rules.

Bonus SEO Tips:

  1. Keep all of your urls lower case. I won’t bore you with the details but you can learn all about it here – Canonical URLs
  2. Find broken links – You don’t like running into them on other sites, why would a Google spider bot like finding them on your site?
  3. Regularity is the key – Google likes to know you are putting out regular content. This is the key to getting Google spiders to come back to your site time and again.
  4. Check your domain expiration date – Google has no way to knowing whether you are planning on renewing your domain. If it sees that in 3 months your domain is going to expire, it perceives that maybe the people running this site aren’t serious and therefore give it a lower ranking.

I have been doing SEO since the dawn of time, more specifically 1994. I am not the best at it, but I have been able to consistently drive triple or quadruple digit growth in whatever website I touch via SEO. If you have any deeper questions and are curious on how to drive real traffic to your site, please feel free to contact me.

Leveling Up – JPUOPOLO.COM has been Gamified – Experiments With Gamification

Ever since game dynamics really took center stage with things like Foursquare, I have become very interested in how people become so quickly enticed in to getting badges and earning points. There are have been other companies who have taken gamification to websites. Two companies, specifically Badgeville and Bigdoor, have caught my attention. I will be writing a detailed article on both. In the interim, I have decided to gamify my website using Big Door’s plug-in. Now by interacting with my site you can earn points. Right now you can’t use these points for anything (I am still figuring that part out).

If you want to earn some points you can start by:

  • Checking In using the bar below  (10 points) 
  • Commenting on any article (15 points)
  • Liking my page (10 points)

I am still experimenting with Gamification, but would like your input on how I could either improve the experience and make gamification a worthwhile addition to my site. I would encourage you to to interact with my site and see game dynamics in play.

A Farewell to Movember

So After 30 days of Moustache awesomeness it is time to call it an end. We raised a lot of money for Movember and hope to raise more. If you haven’t donated, you should feel ashamed of yourself. Alleviate this overwhelming feeling of guilt by donating now mobro.com/jpuopolo

Watch the farewell to #Movember in the little video I cooked up!


You can also view my salute to moustaches here.